The main reason which made me buy this transceiver, has been its low cost reported to available modes (CW, SSB, FM), providing me the possibility to start working in digital modes without quit the CW and the "relatively" high power (abt. 15 W - 20 W PEAK in SSB) for an equipment which is intended for CB traffic, where the power limit is 4 watts.
As a CB transceiver, the things are good, mainly because once the radio channels are already configured, is very easy to use it. It also performs very well in radio traffic, both at RX as well as TX, with up to 4 W in a simple CB antenna, mounted on the car's roof. The SWR report indicated by the transceiver does not exceed 1:1.4, and the covered distance usually exceeds 8-10 km, even when I am "surrounded" by high relief.
The RX part is also helped by the large internal speaker, mounted on the lower cover of the transceiver, which provides a good quality of the audio signal. Because of the speaker position, is useful that the surface on which the transceiver sits to be a "soft" material (wood, cloth or rubber), which keeps a large audio spectrum, thus improving clarity.
Another stage was the transceiver programming for 10 meter band and keeping a few channels useful for CB road traffic. The operation itself is not complicated, but the equipment preparation for programming is a little bit "unfriendly", as it involves the lid opening, the transceiver "overthrow" and connecting of the programming cable to the motherboard. In case of outdoor trips, such operations are not even the most desirable, but, assuming that the programming is performed rare and on a stable surface, then we can ignore the lack of a dedicated connector on the front or back panel.
Although the programming is relatively easy, take some time to configure all the channels. And this because I could not use the application provided with the programming cable, being forced to use another application, AT_5555, ver. 4.0.0. This application does not provides features to automatically fill the fields for TX frequencies, not even the Copy/Paste functions. So, for example, if you need to set same RX and TX frequencies for each channel, you have to enter all digits of a frequency expressed in MHz, with 6 digits after comma, in both RX and TX fields. Fortunately, if the last digits after comma are zero, you don't have to enter them.
Therefore, after the first programming sessions, carefully check the reception and transmission frequencies for each channel to avoid unwanted differences when you are on the field.
Returning to channels programming, I have taken into account the 10 m band plan for channels configuration, with a spacing between channels according with the working modes. Thus, I grouped in the A band all narrow modes (CW and digimodes) from 28,002 to 28,120 MHz, with 2 KHz frequency spacing between channels.
(... not finished, yet !...)